Living without cable TV

September 02, 2006

On a recent rainy Saturday afternoon, all I wanted to do was eat a peanut butter sandwich and watch some TV. After flipping for half an hour between a rerun of "The Outer Limits" and an infomercial for ProActiv acne solution, I realized I need cable. Scratch that. I want cable. No one really needs cable, but it feels that way sometimes. For two years, I've been forgoing cable TV, mainly because of the cost. For just a bare-bones cable package in my area, it's about $60 a month, or $720 a year. Considering my salary, it just didn't seem worth it. I'm in the minority. With 93 million subscribers to either cable or satellite television last year (according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association), only about 10 percent of American homes go without. Just a small fraction of those cite cost as a deciding factor, experts say. Cable television isn't considered a luxury; it's a given. It seems especially true among people my age -- people younger than MTV, CNN, ESPN and Nickelodeon. The 1980s were when cable TV really took off, and it's hard for many who grew up then to imagine living without it. And these days, as cable gets bundled with Internet and phone services, it's a service most Americans pay for without really thinking about it. ___ WITHOUT CABLE So, just who doesn't get cable? There's no real geographic or demographic pattern to it, said Megan Pollock, a spokeswoman for the Consumer Electronics Association. Mostly, it's people who simply don't want it. And of course, there are some people who truly can't afford it. Then I guess there are the few like me: cheapskate TV-lovers in denial. I blame my parents for my neurotic TV guilt. I was fed a meager diet of Disney movies and PBS programming for years, and until I was about 5 or 6, I didn't even know other channels existed. A hopelessly out-of-touch preschooler, I thought that Love-a-lot the Care Bear was just my stuffed animal, Rainbow Brite was only an illustration on my lunch box, and my friend's Jem! doll was Barbie's strangely proportioned cousin. But TV's influence was unavoidable. After many afternoons spent at my classmates' houses, I learned about the other channels -- not just cartoons, but all the great stuff cable had to offer, like the green slime on Nickelodeon and the New Kids On The Block on MTV. Cable was a delicious, forbidden fruit. Cable shows geared toward young people were a big reason cable took off, according to Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications. Warner Communications (now Time Warner, the folks who I'll soon be paying $80 a month for cable plus high-speed Internet) created MTV in 1981, primarily so kids would bug their parents to get cable installed, Turow said. So now, kids grow up with cable. And when people enter the working world after college -- where the dorms are outfitted with cable -- they want to keep up that lifestyle. Of course, the costs can hit home. ___ PRICEY HABIT Combine cable TV with high-speed Internet and phone service, and you're spending well over $100 a month -- exceeding the typical American commuter's monthly gasoline costs, even at today's high prices. Forget being addicted to oil; we're addicted to telecom. And even when the economy has lagged, cable and satellite television subscriptions have climbed steadily. Over the past three decades, the number of subscribers to cable or satellite television has increased by about 2 to 3 million every year, with no exception, according to data from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. No wonder U.S. cable and satellite providers aren't jumping to give us "a la carte" programming like what's available in France and some other European and Asian countries, where you can choose which cable channels you want. As a population, we've proven that, like clockwork, we're willing to pay for subscriptions, now averaging about $40 per month for the popular expanded basic cable (more than 500 channels), up from about $10 in 1986 (for far fewer channels), the NCTA says. An AP-Ipsos poll taken in mid-December found that 78 percent of American adults would prefer cable a la carte, but I doubt many of them would cancel their cable if it doesn't happen. So I guess I'm the next lemming to make the jump. Frankly, all I gained from avoiding cable was about $1,500. The old, cable-less me would cry, "But if you stick it out for five more years, and you'll save another $7,500! Or 10 more years, another $15,000! Think of all the shoes!" She makes a good point, but with movie tickets pushing $11 and DVDs costing even more that that, cable is still a relative deal. Now, I don't plan to abandon my public television roots completely -- in my opinion, the Food Network's got nothing on PBS's "Lidia's Italian Table" and "America's Test Kitchen." But it'll be nice to have a little variety on a rainy afternoon. ___ asap contributor Madlen Read is an AP business writer based in New York, in an office where ceiling-mounted televisions -- the nearest one about 20 feet from her desk -- are tuned to cable news channels all day and night.